'I was terrified of being on my own'

Jemma Redgrave talks to Cassandra Jardine about rebuilding her marriage, falling for Dawn French and the burden of the family name

By Cassandra Jardine

12:00AM GMT 19 Mar 2001

'WE are not a troupe," says Jemma Redgrave - and our chat, friendly until then, hits the skids. "That's just a" she says, groping for the right word to express the way people seem deliberately to misunderstand the loose dynamics of the family whose famous name she bears. Eventually she settles for "construct".

Jemma: 'I wasn't miserable being a single parent. It was good for me, it made me more independent'

I should have known that asking whether Redgrave ever felt pushed to keep pace with the rest of the family would not go down well. She has spoken before of "potentially having no identity of my own", and does not take kindly to being lumped in competition with her grandparents, Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson; her father, Corin Redgrave; her aunts Vanessa and Lynn - not to mention her third-generation contemporaries, Natasha and Joely Richardson, Vanessa's children.

Besides, Redgrave is not a woman you want to upset, as she appears unsure of herself. Her very first words are a request that I should "make her sound better" than she does - quite unnecessarily, since she expresses herself very clearly.

She does her best to be open about difficult topics, such as the separation from her barrister husband Tim Owen, their reunion and new baby. But at the word "Redgrave", the wide smile closes up and a wariness descends.

I sympathise. It must be infuriating to be considered a small cog in a vast acting machine, however successful - added to which, Redgrave has long had to put up with people poking fun at her father and aunt for their connections with the Workers' Revolutionary Party.

Nor can she - seemingly the most conventional member of the family - enjoy it when yet another sexual skeleton rattles its way out of the closet. There has been bisexuality (Sir Michael), death from Aids (Vanessa's ex-husband, Tony Richardson) and, recently, Lynn learnt that her husband, John Clark, had fathered a child by their future daughter-in-law. She and Clark are divorcing.

But it is hardly surprising if outsiders take an interest when the Redgraves can't stop writing about themselves. Even Jemma's mother, Deirdre Hamilton-Hill, wrote To Be a Redgrave about her failed marriage to Corin. And now Lynn has written a play, The Mandrake Root, "inspired" by her mother, which deals with "betrayal, sexuality and the painful revelation of family secrets". According to some, Vanessa - who lives with 90-year-old Rachel Kempson - has been enraged but Corin, on behalf of the rest of the family, has expressed his full support for Lynn.

Jemma's memories of childhood are of the delights of sharing Christmases and Easters, "just like any family". There were also, of course, theatre trips when she was a child: "I was five when my grandmother took me to see my first play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was Peter Brook's white box production and I kept asking why there wasn't a wood. Children of that age are used to most of the conversation passing them by. I remember being thrilled when words I knew - like melancholy - jumped out at me.

"Two years ago, I took my son Gabriel to see A Midsummer Night's Dream when he was five. Of course, he was delighted there was a character on stage called Bottom. Now he keeps asking me whether my fairies are being naughty."

Jemma, 36, is about to appear on the West End stage playing Titania, opposite Dawn French as Bottom. "It would be very easy to fall in love with Dawn," she says, sounding too sincere to be accused of luvviness.

The aspect of the role that gives her most pleasure is that it represents a first for the family. The tall, thin Redgraves usually appear as Helena, "the painted maypole": "Lynn has played her, so has Vanessa, Rachel absolutely has, but no one has played Titania," she says, triumphantly.

She must have plenty to draw upon for the part, I suggest, having recently been separated from her own husband (during which time she was rumoured to be having a romance with the actor Jonathan Cake, her co-star in the Channel 4 series Mosley). Just as in the play, where Titania and Oberon are reunited after their vicissitudes, Redgrave and Owen got back together after 18 months.

"I hadn't thought of the parallels," she says. Nor, apparently, had she thought Titania-ish the behaviour of her mother following her divorce from Corin when Jemma was nine. "She certainly did have a lot of affairs and I did tell her I didn't always see what she saw in someone, but I didn't turn the searchlight on my own life for inspiration."

If not, it may be out of relief that all is sorted out after the split, which was, she says, created by overwork. When Tim moved out, she had been doing long hours six days a week as the lead in Bramwell, a lengthy ITV series about a Victorian doctor. Having suffered as a result of her parents' divorce, she was determined not to inflict that pain on Gabriel, so Tim moved round the corner from their north London home and stayed in touch.

'I wasn't miserable being a single parent, but it wasn't what I wanted and I was terrified of being on my own, having been in a relationship for a long time. But it was good for me, it made me more independent."

Yet hadn't her delightfully wayward mother's divorce made her independent from an early age?

"Perhaps it didn't feel like that inside," she muses. "Without Tim, I felt as if I had lost a limb, but it's fine now. It's working. Perhaps my attitude has changed. I shall never be on a schedule as gruelling again. I don't let my agent find me work in August and I rush back from work to be with the children.

"Alfie is only 11 months and I still have nappy brain. I don't think I ever got my memory back after Gabriel and I gave up breast-feeding only a month ago - although I returned to work to make a two-part thriller when Alfie was five months. It was sooner than I wanted but it's much easier to be organised with your second baby, as you are already in a routine."

Two days after Alfie was born, last April, Tim was made a QC, she tells me, proudly. He takes both civil and criminal cases and, last summer, represented Jodie, the Siamese twin whose survival depended on the death of her sister, Mary.

I ask if she still plans to have 10 children, as she once said. "I can't think beyond this one," she replies. "Work is very important to me.

"I love theatre. It was watching the history plays in my teens that made me want to act. I wanted to be Helen Mirren. And A Midsummer Night's Dream," she adds, "is a very significant play in my life because my father was playing Lysander when he first met my mother, who came along to see the play with a friend of his."

When Redgrave chooses to talk about her family, she's relaxed; it's only when someone else dares ask that a regal hauteur - befitting a member of Britain's first family of theatre - invades her manner. She should make a very fine fairy queen.

A Midsummer Night's Dream opens at the Albery Theatre, London WC2, on March 22